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Alexa von Tobel will join Disrupt 2021 as a Startup Battlefield judge
Alexa von Tobel, co-founder and managing partner of Inspired Capital, will be joining TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 taking place September 21-23 to help judge the startups competing in Startup Battlefield. NOTE: Applications are now open to don’t hesitate to throw your hat in the ring here!
Prior to Inspired Capital, Alexa founded LearnVest in 2008 with the goal of helping women in particular make better investments and learn financial planning. After raising $75 million in venture capital and growing the service to 1.5 million users, LearnVest was acquired by Northwestern Mutual in May 2015 for $250 million.
Following the acquisition, Alexa joined the management team of Northwestern Mutual as the company’s first chief digital officer. She later assumed the role of chief innovation officer, a position in which which she oversaw Northwestern Mutual’s venture arm.
Alexa, who holds a Certified Financial Planner designation, is also The New York Times-bestselling author of “Financially Fearless,” which debuted in December 2013, and its follow-up, “Financially Forward,” which arrived in May 2019. She is also the host of “The Founders Project with Alexa von Tobel,” a weekly podcast with Inc. that highlights entrepreneurs.
Alexa is a member of the 2016 Class of Henry Crown Fellows and an inaugural member of President Obama’s Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship. She has been honored with numerous recognitions, including: a Forbes Magazine cover story, Fortune’s 40 Under 40, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 and World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader.
Alexa recently joined us at TechCrunch Early Stage, where she led a breakout session on financial planning targeted specifically at startups. Join us at Disrupt this September and get your ticket for under $100 for a limited time!
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Customer care as a service: Outsourcing can help your startup wow clients 24/7
Your clients might not demand 24/7 customer service yet, but they’re certainly hoping for it. But how can a startup with a lean staff provide round-the-clock customer care? There are several options available, but more than ever, outsourcing is one of them.
When should your startup consider outsourcing its customer care? And what should you look for in a provider? Here are some insights on what customer care as a service (CCaaS) can do for you, and how fast-growing startups have been leveraging this new class of partners to boost customer satisfaction.
Addressing customer care challenges
Customer care as a service can address several pain points, such as the need to provide support outside of business hours.
If you find the right partner, outsourcing customer service can help you save time over options such as finding and managing your own freelancers, or hiring in-house, which might burden you with fixed costs.
Since online shoppers didn’t have to wait for stores to open during lockdowns, they have increasingly been making purchases on evenings and weekends, and often tend to abandon their carts if nobody is around to answer their doubts. New clients aside, existing customers also hope to get responses outside of typical business hours.
The COVID-19 crisis has significantly increased the share of e-commerce in total retail in recent months, and these new purchasing habits are likely to stick, the OECD pointed out in a report last year. This led many small retailers to discover a reality that e-commerce startups already know well: When you are an online business, working hours aren’t really a thing.
And it’s not just e-commerce — from SaaS to mobility services, there is a growing range of startups for which always-on customer service no longer a luxury. French CCaaS provider Onepilot learned this firsthand: During its beta program, its “support heroes” were available from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m., but it is now moving to 24/7 coverage due to greater demand from clients, co-founder Pierre Latscha told TechCrunch.
French micromobility startup Pony, one of Onepilot’s clients, needed reliable customer care for its dockless bike and scooter fleets in several cities, but couldn’t justify the expense of an in-house hire: “We didn’t have enough demand to have someone take care of customer service full time,” Pony explained to French newspaper Les Échos (translation ours).
In such situations, outsourcing to a partner like Onepilot can save costs when demand isn’t high enough or constant, which is often the case when the business is seasonal or growing faster than the startup can address it.
The latter was the case for SPRiNG, a French subscription service for eco-friendly laundry detergent and cleaning products that has partnered with Onepilot. The startup launched in the summer of 2020, and thanks to €2.1 million in seed funding, its team tripled, but with “tens of thousands of clients,” it soon felt the need for more support to handle the growing volume of requests, co-founder Ben Guerville told us via email.
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E-commerce tracking platform AfterShip raises $66M led by Tiger Global
AfterShip launched in 2012 to help online sellers track packages across different carriers, but since then it has built a suite of data analytics tools covering almost every step of the shopping experience, from email marketing to customer retention. The Hong Kong-headquartered startup announced today it has raised a $66 million Series B led by Tiger Global, with participation from Hillhouse Capital’s GL Ventures.
AfterShip’s last round of funding was a $1 million Series A in 2014. Co-founder Andrew Chan told TechCrunch that the company has been profitable since its launch and grew mainly through word-of-mouth referrals and partnerships, like a Shopify integration, that boosted its profile. But the company recently added a sales team and will use its latest capital on international hiring for sales and customer support. It also plans to launch new products and expand further in the United States, where about 70% of AfterShip’s customers are located.
The company’s software enables sellers to track shipments made through more than 740 carriers and handles more than 6 billion shipments each year. AfterShip’s partners with about 10,000 companies, including some of the biggest names in e-commerce: Shopify (where it is used by 50,000 merchants), Magento, Squarespace, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Groupon, Rakuten, Wish and retail brands like Dyson and Inditex.
A branded shipment tracking page and email created with AfterShip’s software. Image Credits: AfterShip
AfterShip’s core product is its shipment tracking platform, but it also makes apps for shoppers, including self-service returns and package tracking, and sales and marketing tools for merchants that let them get more use out of data from shipments. Chan explained that package tracking is also a user engagement tool for sellers that lets them show more product recommendations and promotions to shoppers. AfterShip’s tools enables merchants to create their own branded tracking pages and notifications. Other features allow them to track the performance of different carriers, create email marketing campaigns and increase customer retention.
Its CRM capabilities help AfterShip differentiate from other shipment tracking aggregator providers.
“When we think of our vision, we look at what Salesforce is doing, but is there an e-commerce Salesforce that can cover more topics for sales people to use,” Chan said.
In press statement, Pengfei Wang, global partner at Tiger Global, said, “AfterShip leads the charge in making the shipping process more transparent and reliable for consumers and companies alike. As growth in e-commerce spirals ever upward, we are excited to partner with AfterShip and its leadership team as they continue to advance technology in this critical and expanding industry.”
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Brazil’s Loft adds $100M to its accounts, $700M to its valuation in a single month
Nearly exactly one month ago, digital real estate platform Loft announced it had closed on $425 million in Series D funding led by New York-based D1 Capital Partners. The round included participation from a mix of new and existing investors such as DST, Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Fifth Wall and QED, among many others.
At the time, Loft was valued at $2.2 billion, a huge jump from its being just near unicorn territory in January 2020. The round marked one of the largest ever for a Brazilian startup.
Now, today, São Paulo-based Loft has announced an extension to that round with the closing of $100 million in additional funding that values the company at $2.9 billion. This means that the 3-year-old startup has increased its valuation by $700 million in a matter of weeks.
Baillie Gifford led the Series D-2 round, which also included participation from Tarsadia, Flight Deck, Caffeinated and others. Individuals also put money in the extension, including the founders of Better (Zach Frenkel), GoPuff, Instacart, Kavak and Sweetgreen.
Loft has seen great success in its efforts to serve as a “one-stop shop” for Brazilians to help them manage the home buying and selling process.
Image Credits: Loft
In 2020, Loft saw the number of listings on its site increase “10 to 15 times,” according to co-founder and co-CEO Mate Pencz. Today, the company actively maintains more than 13,000 property listings in approximately 130 regions across São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, partnering with more than 30,000 brokers. Not only are more people open to transacting digitally, more people are looking to buy versus rent in the country.
“We did more than 6x YoY growth with many thousands of transactions over the course of 2020,” Pencz told TechCrunch at the time of the company’s last raise. “We’re now growing into the many tens of thousands, and soon hundreds of thousands, of active listings.”
The decision to raise more capital so soon was due to a variety of factors. For one, Loft has received “overwhelming investor interest” even after “a very, very oversubscribed main round,” Pencz said.
“We have seen a continued acceleration in our market share growth, especially in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two markets we currently operate in,” he added. “We saw an opportunity to grow even faster with additional capital.”
Pencz also pointed out that Baillie Gifford has relatively large minimum check size requirements, which led to the extension being conducted at a higher price and increased the total round size “by quite a bit to be able to accommodate them.”
While the company was less forthcoming about its financials as of late, it told me last year that it had notched “over $150 million in annualized revenues in its first full year of operation” via more than 1,000 transactions.
The company’s revenues and GMV (gross merchandise value) “increased significantly” in 2020, according to Pencz, who declined to provide more specifics. He did say those figures are “multiples higher from where they were,” and that Loft has “a very clear horizon to profitability.”
Pencz and Florian Hagenbuch founded Loft in early 2018 and today serve as its co-CEOs. The aim of the platform, in the company’s words, is “bringing Latin American real estate into the e-commerce age by developing online alternatives to analogue legacy processes and leveraging data to create transparency in highly opaque markets.” The U.S. real estate tech company with the closest model to Loft’s is probably Zillow, according to Pencz.
In the United States, prospective buyers and sellers have the benefit of MLSs, which in the words of the National Association of Realtors, are private databases that are created, maintained and paid for by real estate professionals to help their clients buy and sell property. Loft itself spent years and many dollars in creating its own such databases for the Brazilian market. Besides helping people buy and sell homes, it offers services around insurance, renovations and rentals.
In 2020, Loft also entered the mortgage business by acquiring one of the largest mortgage brokerage businesses in Brazil. The startup now ranks among the top-three mortgage originators in the country, according to Pencz. When it comes to helping people apply for mortgages, he likened Loft to U.S.-based Better.com.
This latest financing brings Loft’s total funding raised to an impressive $800 million. Other backers include Brazil’s Canary and a group of high-profile angel investors such as Max Levchin of Affirm and PayPal, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and David Vélez, CEO and founder of Brazilian fintech Nubank. In addition, Loft has also raised more than $100 million in debt financing through a series of publicly listed real estate funds.
Loft plans to use its new capital in part to expand across Brazil and eventually in Latin America and beyond. The company is also planning to explore more M&A opportunities.
This article was updated post-publication to reflect accurate investor information.
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Universal Hydrogen raises $20.5M Series A to help launch hydrogen aviation
The race to decarbonize aviation got a boost this Earth Day with the announcement of a $20.5 million Series A round by Universal Hydrogen, a Los Angeles-based startup aiming to develop hydrogen storage solutions and conversion kits for commercial aircraft.
“Hydrogen is the only viable path for aviation to reach Paris Agreement targets and help limit global warming,” said founder and CEO Paul Eremenko in an interview with TechCrunch. “We are going to build an end-to-end hydrogen value chain for aviation by 2025.”
The round was led by Playground Global, with an investor syndicate including Fortescue Future Industries, Coatue, Global Founders Capital, Plug Power, Airbus Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, Sojitz Corporation and Future Shape.
The company’s first product will be lightweight modular capsules to transport “green hydrogen,” produced using renewable power to aircraft equipped with hydrogen fuel cells. The capsules will ultimately be available in different sizes for aircraft ranging from VTOL air taxis to long-distance, single-aisle planes.
“We want them to be interchangeable within each class of aircraft, a bit like consumer batteries today,” says Eremenko.
To help kickstart the market for its capsules, Universal Hydrogen is developing one such plane itself, a modified 40-60-seat turboprop capable of regional flights of up to 700 miles. The effort is a collaboration with seed investor Plug Power, which will supply the hydrogen and fuel cells, and magniX, which develops motors for electric aircraft.
Eremenko hopes to have the plane flying paying passengers in a larger, 50-plus seater aircraft by 2025 and ultimately to produce kits for regional airlines to retrofit their own aircraft.
“We want to have a couple of years of service to de-risk hydrogen certification and passenger acceptance before Boeing and Airbus decide on the airplanes they are going to build in the early 2030s,” says Eremenko. “It’s imperative that at least one of them build a hydrogen airplane or aviation is not going to hit its climate goals.”
Universal Hydrogen is not alone in betting on hydrogen. ZeroAvia in the U.K. is developing its own regional fuel cell aircraft on an even more ambitious timeline, and Airbus in particular has been working on hydrogen aircraft concepts.
Eremenko hopes that producing a simple and safe hydrogen logistics network will soon attract new entrants.
“It’s like the Nespresso system. We have to make the first coffee maker or nobody cares about our capsule technology, but we don’t want to be in the coffee maker business. We want other people to build coffee with our capsules.”
Universal Hydrogen will use the Series A funds to grow its current 12-person team to around 40 and accelerate its technology development.
30kW sub-scale demonstration of Universal Hydrogen’s aviation powertrain, with Plug Power’s hydrogen fuel cell and a magniX motor.
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PicPay, the Brazilian mobile payments platform, files for an IPO on Nasdaq
Brazilian mobile payments app PicPay filed on Wednesday an F-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an IPO valued at up to $100 million. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol PICS.
PicPay operates largely as a financial services platform that includes a credit card, a digital wallet similar to that of Apple Pay, a Venmo-style P2P payments element, e-commerce and social networking features.
“We want to transform the way people and companies interact, make transactions, and communicate in an intelligent, connected, and simple experience,” said José Antonio Batista, CEO of PicPay, in a statement.
While the company is based in São Paulo now and operates across Brazil, PicPay originally launched in Vitoria in 2012, a coastal city north of Rio. In 2015 the company was acquired by the group J&F Investimentos SA, a holding company owned by Brazilian billionaire brothers Wesley and Joesley Batista, which also own the gigantic meatpacker JBS SA.
According to the company’s registration statement, J&F was involved in the biggest corruption scandal in Brazil’s history, known as The Car Wash, and in 2017 entered into a plea deal with the Brazilian Federal Prosecutor. In December 2020 the company agreed to pay a fine of $1.5 billion and contribute an extra $442.6 million to social projects in Brazil. That being said, J&F continues to be a powerful conglomerate in the country, positioning itself as a strong backer for PicPay.
2020 was an explosive year for PicPay as the company saw its active userbase grow from 28.4 million to 36 million as of March 2021. According to the company’s 2020 financial report, which PicPay shared with TechCrunch, the company’s revenues also grew drastically from $15.5 million in 2019, to $71 million in 2020. The company is not yet profitable, however, and PicPay shelled out $146 million in 2020 to fuel its growth.
“We believe that the growth of our base and user engagement in our ecosystem demonstrates the scalability of our business model and reveals a great opportunity to generate more value for these customers,” Batista added.
Fintech is one of the most popular sectors in Brazil today, because there’s a lot of room for improvement in the region. The country has traditionally been controlled by four major banks, which have been slow to adapt to technology and also charge very high fees.
PicPay’s IPO is being led by Banco Bradesco BBI, Banco BTG Pactual, Santander Investment Securities Inc., and Barclays Capital Inc.
*The Brazilian Real was valued at 5.50 to $1 USD on the date of publication.
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WhizzCo helps publishers maximize their content recommendation revenue
Israeli startup WhizzCo says it’s time for publishers to adopt the programmatic, auction-based approach when it comes to the ads in content recommendation widgets like Outbrain and Taboola.
After all, publishers regular employ this approach for most of their other digital ad units. But co-founder and CEO Alon Rosenthal said that when trying to monetize his own websites, he discovered for himself that it was “impossible” to maximize the revenue from those widgets in the same way.
“That was our real pain,” he said.
So with WhizzCo, Rosenthal and his team have built what they call a Content Recommendation Yield Platform, pulling native advertising from more than 40 different content recommendation providers, predicting which one will deliver the highest revenue for a given impression (whether that’s measured in CPM, CPC or CPA) and then delivering the ad from that provider.
Rosenthal added that WhizzCo works with publishers to ensure that the recommendation widgets and ads look like they’re a native part of a page, and that their appearance doesn’t change regardless of where the ad comes from. He also said the publishers implement WhizzCo’s JavaScript on “not in the header, but on the actual code of the site — by doing that, we eliminate any loading problems whatsoever.”
Although WhizzCo is coming out of stealth now, it was actually founded in 2017 and has already worked with a number of publishers, including Penske Media Corporation’s She Media. In a statement, She Media Senior Vice President of Operations Ryan Nathanson said, “WhizzCo’s platform allowed us to create a competitive ecosystem, which has enabled tighter customization, competition and editorial guideline control, yielding a 75% increase in content recommendation CPM.”
And Rosenthal said that on average, WhizzCo customers see a 37.7% lift in content recommendation revenue.
“Our motto is that no one delivers 100% performance, 100% of the time,” he said. “No matter who you are, even if you’re Google [or any of the other big ad companies,] you cannot perform best at all times. That’s where we come in with our technology.”
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How are VCs handling diligence in a world where deals open and close in days, not months?
The global venture capital market had a cracking start to the year. Coming off a 2020 high, VC totals in the United States, in Europe, and among competitive verticals like insurtech and AI are on pace to set new records in 2021.
The rapid-fire deal-making and trend of larger venture checks at higher valuations that The Exchange has tracked for some time require private-market investors to make decisions faster than ever. For venture capitalists, the timeline for reaching conviction around a startup’s thesis and executing due diligence has become compressed.
Some venture capitalists are turning to data to move more quickly. Some are spending more time preparing to be vetted themselves. And some investors are simply doing the work beforehand.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
We were tipped off to the concept of pre-diligence during the reporting process for a look into recent fundraising trends in the AI/ML space. Sapphire investor Jai Das, when asked about how he was handling a competitive and swiftly moving market for AI startup investments, said that “most firms are completing their due diligence way before the financing actually happens.”
How does that work in practice? Per Das, startups that raise quick Series A and B rounds are “tracked by [early-stage] investors as soon as they raise their seed financings. So there is no need to do any due diligence during the financing and hence most of these financings are pre-emptive.”
Venture capital: Now more about sales than ever before!
This morning, The Exchange is digging into the question of how VCs are handling diligence in a world where the most attractive deals can open and close faster than ever, and old models of deep diligence and paced deal-making are outmoded.
Getting to yes
One way that investors are betting on themselves in a bid to speed their diligence and decision-making is by investing in their own tech. That may sound obvious, given that venture capital dollars often land in the accounts of tech-focused companies, but in a business that was previously known for its relationship focus — more on that shortly — the trend is worth considering.
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Satellite imagery startup Albedo closes $10M seed round
While most startups today are creating software, not every upstart enterprise is taking a code-only approach to building a business. Some of today’s most ambitious startups are aiming quite a bit higher.
Albedo is one such company. The recent Y Combinator graduate wants to build a constellation of low-orbit satellites that can provide higher-resolution Earth imaging than what is generally available today. And it just closed a $10 million seed round.
Initialized Capital led the investment, which also saw participation from Jetstream, Liquid2 Ventures and Soma Capital.
TechCrunch has had its eye on Albedo since its Y Combinator run, discussing the firm’s approach to providing what it describes as “aerial-quality” images — though they are taken from space instead of a drone or aircraft. In more technical parlance, Albedo wants to provide 10-centimeter visual imagery and 2-meter thermal imagery.
According to Topher Haddad, Albedo’s co-founder and CEO, the company aims to launch its first satellite in 2024 and bring its full constellation to orbit by 2027. With eight satellites, the company can provide daily image revisits; with 24, it can do that three times each day, though the eight-satellite fleet will be an early milestone for the startup, according to its CEO.
Why hasn’t someone already tried to build what Albedo is working on? The company, Haddad explained, has been made possible in part due to advances in the larger space economy, and the fact that major cloud providers AWS and Azure have both built out services to handle satellite data — “AWS Ground Station” in the case of the former and “Azure Orbital” in the latter. Mix in cheaper launches and more modular satellite construction, and what Albedo wants to do is becoming possible.
Albedo CEO and co-founder Topher Haddad. Image Credits: Albedo
There’s some tech risk to what Albedo aims to do, however. Haddad explained to TechCrunch how his company hopes to employ in-orbit refueling for its satellites’ electric propulsion so that they can stay afloat longer; if that effort fails, or drag winds up being worse than anticipated, Albedo’s satellites might have to opt for slightly higher orbits and lower-res photos in the 12- to 15-centimeter range.
For fun, what does that resolution mean in more practical terms? A 10-centimeter-resolution image from a satellite is one in which each pixel is 10 centimeters on each side. So, a 15-centimeter-resolution image would have pixels that were more than twice the surface area of a 10-centimeter shot.
Resolution matters, as does the regularity of new pictures being taken. On the latter front, the company’s eventual fleet of satellites should keep its photos fresh.
Albedo intends to target companies of all sizes as customers. The imaging world is a big market, with Haddad expecting to find customers among property insurance companies, mapping concerns, utility firms and other large companies. And now it has more capital than ever to pursue its goals.
The round
It takes more money to get a space startup off the ground than it takes to iterate on an early software product. So, what does the $10 million it just raised get Albedo? The first thing is staff. When TechCrunch last spoke with Haddad, the company was still a team of three. That’s about to change, however; a number of new hires recently accepted offers, and the company expects to add another four or five people to its staff in addition to those already planning to join.
Albedo said it anticipates a staff of 10 to 12 by the end of the year.
The $10 million will also allow the company to fund a down payment on rocket space and payments to suppliers that should allow Albedo to wrap up its satellite design. Per its CEO, the startup expects to raise a larger Series A in around a year to help finance getting its first satellite into orbit. That moment will allow the startup to better prove its technology, and, if all goes well, help it to raise even more capital to keep its launch schedule packed.
Let’s see how far the company can get with its new capital, and if it finds sufficient, ahem, lift to reach the next funding milestone. If it does, we could wind up covering the launch of its first satellite. That would be fun.
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Podcast recording platform Riverside.fm raises $9.5M
The past year has changed the way we work, on so many levels — a fact from which podcasters certainly weren’t immune. I can say, anecdotally, that as a long-time podcaster, I had thrown in the towel on my long-standing insistence that I do all of my interviews in-person — for what should probably be obvious reasons.
2020 saw many shows shifting to a remote format and experimenting with different remote recording tools, from broad teleconferencing software like Zoom to more bespoke solutions like Zencastr. Tel Aviv-based Riverside.fm (originally from Amsterdam) launched right on time to ride the remote podcasting wave, and today the service is announcing a $9.5 million Series A.
The round is led by Seven Seven Six and features Zeev-ventures.com, Casey Neistat, Marques Brownlee, Guy Raz, Elad Gil and Alexander Klöpping. The company says it plans to use the money to increase headcount and build out more features for the service.
“As many were forced to adapt to remote work and production teams struggled to deliver the same in person quality, from a distance—Gideon and Nadav saw an opportunity to not only solve a great need for creators, but to build an extraordinary product,” Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian said in a release. “As a creator myself, I can say from experience that Riverside’s quality is unmatched and the new editing capabilities are peerless.”
Riverside.fm is a remote video and audio platform that records lossless audio and 4K video tracks remotely to each user’s system, saving the end result from the kind of technical hiccups that come with spotty internet connections.
Along with the funding round, the company is also rolling out a number of software updates to its platform. At the top of the list is brand new version of its iPhone app, which instantly records and uploads video, a nice extension as more users are looking to record their end on mobile devices.
On the desktop front, “Magic Editor” streamlines the multi-step process of recording, editing and uploading. There’s also a new “Smart Speakerview” feature that automatically switches between speakers for video editing, while not switching for accidental noises like sneezing and coughing.
It’s a hot space that’s only heating up. Given how quickly the company was able to piece their original offering together, it will be interesting to see what they’re able to do with an additional $9.5 million in their coffers.
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